All in the Family featured the curmudgeonly Archie Bunker. Archie was television’s most famous grouch, blunt, blustering, straightforward and untouched by the PC crowd. He was the archetype of the conservative male. Michael desprately tried to reeducate him, but he persisted in his breviloquence.

Looking back at the last 40 years, we realize: ARCHIE WAS RIGHT!

9/25/2013

Fred Says

I'm a fan of Fred. In fact I would go so far as to say that he is the heir apparent in entertainingly curmudgeons of Mike Royko, another one of my favorite commentators.

As much as I'm sure his piece on The Rabid Bat, will arouse a strong reaction in my friend Professor Hale, I can't resist sharing this tid bit.

Squabbling over specifications immediately began. Lockheed-Martin and Boeing Military Aircraft, both expected to bid, wanted a cruising speed of Mach 13, as this was technically impossible and would allow them to do lucrative design work until the entropic death of the solar system. A time-honored principle of governmental contraction is that if you are paid to solve a problem, the last thing you want is to succeed, because you then stop getting paid. This explains the anti-ballistic-missile program, racial policy, and Congress.

The matter of social consciousness arose. Half of fighter pilots were women, as prescribed by law in 2016. To facilitate gender equity, a bracket in the pilot´s seat was mandated, to hold a telephone book for the flier to sit on so she could see out the windshield. Since many pilots were single moms, the design included a drop-down changing table in the cockpit.

5 comments:

Fred's funny. But it's apparent he doesn't understand arms races. If you're going to defend yourself, you need to fight. If you're going to fight, you need to fight to win. To win, you need the best edge over your opponent you can get; as soon as he catches up technologically, you lose that edge. It's that simple.

The Chinese, the Russians, and a few other countries already have fifth-generation fighters in the pipeline, on par with our F-22 and F-35 aircraft. The F-35 is barely coming off the production line, and already the Air Force is looking ahead at the next generation of fighter.

Fred also omitted a complete category of other names for aircraft: weather-related phenomena (P-38 Lightning, F-35 Lightning II, B-45 Tornado, P-47 Thunderbolt, A-10 Thunderbolt II, CH-148 Cyclone, Hawker Hurricane). In that vein, I propose that the next production fighter be nicknamed "Hellstorm", if the list of capabilities in that article is accurate.